The latest Valve Steam Console rumour with AMD RDNA4 can be safely ignored - here's why

Thanks to posts on social media and YouTuber videos, which now other news sites have picked up, we're seeing fresh rumours about a new Steam Machine / Steam Console.

A lot of it seems to have come from @HandleDeck on X, in a post where they suggest and speculate on future Valve hardware that was then picked up in a video from "eXtas1s" on YouTube, and now multiple bigger news websites have decided to run with it.

What's the story here: Valve developer Samuel Pitoiset added a update in the documentation for the open source Mesa graphics drivers recently to note AMD RDNA4 support "should be good enough", just part of the release notes for an upcoming Mesa release, which was shared by Phoronix. For people who don't regularly follow Linux, this seems to have caused their brains to wildly speculate on new Valve hardware coming, and it's now being spun into a rumour of Valve competing with Microsoft and Sony for the console space.

You could run this rumour any time a Valve contracted developer updates Mesa for newer AMD hardware.

Here's why I believe the rumours are plain and simply incorrect: Valve have paid developers to work on the AMD Mesa drivers for years at this point, to improve Linux as a whole and ensure Linux drivers are in a good state for upcoming and future AMD hardware. Valve invest in a lot of different areas for Linux, not all of it specifically just for their own hardware. A lot of their contracted developers just work on regular upgrades and improvements like this. Valve have done this for a long time now that we've been covering here.

This isn't to say Valve definitely aren't working on future hardware, they're always seemingly working on something, just that this specific new rumour is wrong based on where they're getting their information from — a small documentation update for upcoming Mesa driver upgrades (that traditional desktop Linux uses, as well as Valve's SteamOS).

A fair amount of previous rumours ended up being for the Legion Go S with SteamOS, and Valve's wider SteamOS push on more devices. This Mesa update helps with the SteamOS push too, so you could eventually run SteamOS on any of your own AMD RDNA4 devices. Again, it's not specific to Valve hardware.

Valve already have their hands full with all this, and it's a lot of work to add in another system, so they're clearly not yet ready for it. They've already said the hardware for a Steam Deck 2 simply isn't there yet for a generational leap, so it won't be that either. Just don't expect a new home console from Valve any time soon.

I fully expect the next hardware to come from Valve will be a new VR headset to replace the ageing Valve Index.